Category: Backchannel

Right after the keynote in which Steve Jobs introduced the iPod Shuffle, I went backstage with one question in mind: What makes an iPod an iPod? By then—January 11, 2005—I had staked my own claim to iPod expertise, having written a Newsweek cover story about Apple’s transformational music player, and I was writing a bookRead More

About 15 years ago, I was inexplicably offered a job at Google—at age 52. At the time, my age reliably put me in the running for “oldest employee.” Still, I was thrilled to be there, and worked hard to become known as a good colleague, reliable, energetic, and a quick study. As the company grew,Read More

My conversation with Mathias Bahnmueller started as pretty much all my phone interviews do. “Can you hear me?” he asked, and I replied affirmatively. Then I asked him the same question. His answer was yes—he could hear me very clearly. And this was a tiny miracle. That’s because Bahnmueller suffers from hearing loss so severeRead More

Every director knows that the score can make the scene. Anyone who’s ever watched a rough cut without soundtrack music can confirm this. Case in point: Something weird happens to the beloved throne room scene that ends the original 1977 Star Wars, if you’re crazy enough to delete John Williams’s brassy music from it: InsteadRead More

Optimus Prime—the software engine, not the Autobot overlord—was born in a basement under a West Elm furniture store on University Avenue in Palo Alto. Starting two years ago, a band of artificial-intelligence acolytes within Salesforce escaped the towering headquarters with the goal of crazily multiplying the impact of the machine learning models that increasingly shapeRead More

Last week, Elon Musk dashed off 125 characters announcing a remarkably ambitious plan to send Amtrak to an early grave. “Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins,” he proclaimed in a tweet. Ricki Harris is Backchannel’s editorial fellow. ——— Sign up to getRead More

Microsoft recently made a Very Serious Announcement about deploying unused television airwaves to solve the digital divide in America. News outlets ate it up: “To Close Digital Divide, Microsoft to Harness Unused Television Channels,” said the New York Times on July 10, in a headline that could have been written by the PR folks inRead More

On July 18, I opened a browser, pulled up various social media sites, and searched for the #bluewhalechallenge. The Blue Whale Challenge is a nefarious internet meme that encourages those who embrace it to hurt themselves. Over the course of 50 days, an anonymous administrator is said to assign players escalating dares that involve selfRead More

This spring, as part of their coursework, four Stanford University students found themselves in Coronado, California, doing pushups on the beach and charging into a 61-degree surf while overseen by Navy SEAL trainers. They performed this extraordinary homework to better understand the process of inculcating recruits into the elite corps of military frogmen and women.Read More

In June 2016, Antoine Balaresque, the cofounder and CEO of the hot new startup Lily Robotics, stood before a room of business students at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, ready to reveal the PowerPoint slides that had made him an instant startup celebrity. Wearing the ubiquitous Silicon Valley uniform of a T-shirt and jeans, heRead More